He walked to the door and peeked through the window. Beyond was a short, unlit hallway that ended at a stairwell. Out of habit, he scanned the hall in both IR and EM and saw nothing unusual. He opened the door and climbed the stairs to the next level. This floor was mostly open, with a solid wall to his left and a half wall to his right through which he could see hanging drilling pipes and cables. He walked to the wall and looked down. Eighty feet below, the sea churned around the pilings. He continued to the third and top level, which was similar to the one below, save one feature. At the far end he found an enclosed walkway to the eastern-side shacks.
He started across the walkway. As he neared the opposite end, he stopped, listened. Nothing. He was about to keep going, when the sound came again, more distinct this time. Voices. He crept to the end of the walkway, pressed himself flat against the wall, and peered around the corner.
The space he was seeing was only half as long--about thirty feet--and the layout was that of a makeshift laboratory, with a rectangular, laminate-topped worktable running down each wall and three tables spaced perpendicularly down the center. Fluorescent shop lights hung from the ceiling at ten-foot intervals, casting the space in cold gray light.
Beyond the tables Fisher could see what looked like a mobile hyperbaric chamber running lengthwise to the opposite wall; sitting before the chamber on a table was a device. It was approximately ten feet long and comprised of parallel conduits of various diameters, from a quarter inch to four inches, and intertwined electrical cables, all of which came together in a steel ring that seemed to have been welded into the chamber's door just below the porthole window through which Fisher could see dim light. He'd seen pictures of a similar device. It was a crude LINAC, a linear particle accelerator.
Three men were sitting in chairs before the LINAC having an animated discussion. A fourth man in a thigh-length black leather coat stood behind the group, arms folded across his chest. Fisher zoomed in. It was Chin-Hwa Pak.
Stewart was sitting in the middle chair, flanked on both sides by Koreans. The man to Stewart's left was holding a clipboard, which he was tapping with a pen and waving in front of Stewart, who pushed it away.
Behind him, Pak pulled out a pistol and put it to Stewart's head. He leaned over and whispered something in Stewart's ear.
Stewart reluctantly took the clipboard and started leafing through pages.
Fisher took pictures, getting all the men's faces, the LINAC, and the hyperbaric chamber. He scanned the room for a place to plant a Sticky Ear, but it was too confined. Pak would hear the placement.
Stewart had stopped leafing through the clipboard's pages and seemed to be studying something intently. He gestured to one of the men, who pulled a calculator from a briefcase on the floor and handed it over. Stewart started punching numbers, writing notations, and leafing back and forth through the pages.
He handed the clipboard back to the first man and tapped something on the page with his pen, then started gesturing to various parts of the LINAC. The men listened closely until Stewart finished, then began talking to one another across him.
A fourth Korean entered the room through the door beside the chamber. He whispered something to Pak, then handed him what looked like a thin remote control. Pak nodded and pocketed the device.
Suddenly, behind Fisher in the walkway, he heard a creaking. He spun around, gun coming up. A Korean was standing in the walkway. Obviously startled and uncertain, the man squinted, trying to make out the figure half hidden in the shadows. The man's hand shot into his coat and came out with a pistol. Fisher fired. The man stumbled backward, the hand holding the gun still coming up. The barrel flashed, and the shot boomed through the walkway.
Fisher spun again, bringing the pistol around. Pak and his partner were already moving--the latter drawing a pistol and taking aim on Fisher while Pak barked orders at the two other Koreans as he shoved them toward the door. Shots peppered the wall behind Fisher. He crab-walked left, squeezing off a trio of shots as he moved. Pak, having gotten the two other Koreans out the door, turned back to Stewart, who was trying to rise to his knees. Pak drew a pistol from his pocket and leveled it at Stewart's head. Stewart let out a scream that Fisher could only describe as half-angry, half-desperate, then launched himself at Pak. The other Korean, distracted by the scream, turned toward them. Fisher rose up, took aim, and drilled a shot into the side of the man's head.
Pak, startled by Stewart's move, backpedaled toward the door. His gun roared once, then again. Stewart stumbled, but kept coming. He wrapped Pak in a bear hug, and together they tumbled through the door.
Fisher holstered the pistol, drew the SC-20 from his back sling, and sprinted down the space, dodging and leaping tables until he reached the downed Korean. He checked the man; he was dead. On flat feet, Fisher slowly crept to the door and peeked his head around the corner. Pak was gone, but lying headfirst halfway down the steps was Stewart. Fisher rushed to him, knelt down.
He was still alive, but just barely. Fisher unzipped his jacket, ripped open his shirt. One bullet had entered just above his navel; the other in the center of the sternum, just below the breastbone.
"It's a LINAC," Stewart rasped, reaching for Fisher's hand and pulling him closer. "They're using it . . . using it . . ." Stewart coughed. He opened his mouth to speak again, but it was full of bubbling blood.
"I'm sorry, Calvin."
Stewart gave the barest shake of his head, then he went still.
From somewhere below, Fisher heard a muffled crump, then another, then a third. A vibrating rumble rose through the stairs and shook the walls, followed seconds later by the shriek of tortured steel.
The remote,Fisher thought. Getting rid of the evidence.
Fisher gave Stewart's hand a final squeeze, then laid it across his chest and started down the stairs. He stopped. Turned back. One last thing . . .
He rushed back up the stairs into the laboratory. He took close-up pictures of the LINAC and the welded ring connector on the chamber's door, then pressed his face to the porthole window. The angle was tight and the single bulb inside the chamber dim, but he took three quick shots of the interior connectors, hoping to catch enough detail.
Below his feet the deck was canting to the left. Somewhere he could hear the rapid-fire pop pop popof rivets giving way and the wrenching of steel on steel.
He was about to turn away from the chamber when something caught his eye. He pressed his face back to the porthole. It took him a full ten seconds to register what he was seeing. Up and down both of the chamber's walls were crisscrossing streaks of blood, and here and there, also stamped in blood, partial palm prints.
Fisher felt his stomach rise into his throat.
Peter's fingertips had been shredded nearly to the bone.
This is it. This is where it had happened. Where they killed him.
The deck was slanting badly now. Behind him, chairs and desks were skittering across the floor and crashing into the wall. Still staring into the chamber, Fisher grabbed the wheel to steady himself. Somewhere in the back of his head a faint voice prodded him: Get out . . . get out!
He tore his eyes from the porthole and headed for the door.
26
GERMANTOWN, MARYLAND
AFTERa night of observation and restless sleep in Bethesda, Fisher drove himself home, a 1940s farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine about thirty minutes northwest of Washington. At Fisher Farms, as Grimsdottir called it, his closest neighbor wasn't within a stone's throw, and the road he lived on simply wound deeper into the Germantown countryside, so the only traffic he saw was that of neighbors or the occasional wanderer. There was no hum of car engines, no honking of horns--few noises, in fact, save those produced by nature: the chirping of chickadees, the croaking of frogs, the wind fluttering through the maples.